ABOUT THE PROJECT
As a part of the St. Edward's Honors Program Curriculum, a final project in the form of a senior thesis is assigned with the intention of engaging an undergrad in independent research that is reflective of their individual passions and interests.
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Deeply interested in the intersection between my two majors, Finance and Computer Science, I have always wished to find new innovative ways of seeing how these two can benefit from each other, and how concepts native to one field each can be applied to the other. Prior to deciding what my thesis project would be, I was already certain that I wanted to focus on the two things that I am the most passionate about from each field:
User Experience and Work Systemization.
Hoping to find a way in which I could meaningfully connect the two, I set out to look for ways of conceptualizing a project that would allow me explore this intersection.
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One of the central ideas that drives my thesis is examining the way information is shared and presented, and the different ways in which different types of media can be used to present complex concepts in ways that are more effective than from the use of text only. Because of this, I quickly realized that I would not be able to explain these concepts effectively if I had to be limited to a traditional research paper, given that to try to explain the benefit from staying away from text with more text would have been a fatal contradiction.
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I wanted to make a project which not only talked about the concepts of user experience, information interpretation, and work systemization, but that would also be a tangible example of these concepts working together. As I got closer and closer to finding a medium that would be able to do this, It dawned on me that a textual description of complex non-verbal concepts and information would always, in some way, come short to a direct experience with the force itself. If I truly wanted to communicate what I wished to get across, my final product had to be something that an end user would have to experience directly.
Experiencing Information
The concept of experiencing information came about from the intersection between the three of my areas of focus:
User Experience, Information Interpretation, and Systemization.
As proposed by Don Norman in The Design of Everyday Things, I knew that User Experience (UX) was not limited to a website or an interaction with a computer, and that this concept could be used to describe an individual's experience with any product. For sometime I had perceived that in this way, UX could also be used to describe things like an end user's interaction with a display of information (such as a diagram or a chart), or how an employee interacted with a business process.
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Because I realized that part of my final product had to be experienced directly, I grasped that, in other words:
there was information from my final product that had to be interpreted through the user's experience with that information.
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Taking the concept of Interpreting Information, and framing it in the context of interpretation as an experience,
I understood that information can be communicated to an end-user non-verbally, and when it comes to describing and explaining non-verbal concepts, these have to be experienced directly, in some way, in order to be fully perceived and understood.
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Taking this into consideration, my final project has taken the form of a website, aimed at allowing an end user to experience information either through traditional methods, such as reading or seeing, but also through their interaction and user experience of the website.
Bringing the three concepts together, the website also attempts to analyze how decisions to present information are made, with the hope of seeing how principles and processes can be set in order to replicate and continually improve content creation.
The challenge of being able to convey to an end user the complex, self-referential focus of my project lies the proof of concept for the effectiveness of being able to present complex information through ways in which people can directly experience concepts.
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Implications of the Website
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In my ability to convey to an end user the complex and self-referential focus of my project lies what I hope will be the proof of concept behind being able to present complex information through ways in which people can directly experience them if this can be achieved.
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I have decided to launch my website 6 months in advance from the expected date of my completed thesis in May of 2020, with the hope that being able catalog and see the progression of the website will provide some value of its own to the final project.
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